Writing Workshop Lessons

Picking Topics We Know and Care About

For this sheet, the student were encouraged to select things they have never written about! They were to circle the story they want to write next. You can see below Lauren plans to write about a butterfly landing on her leg.

	Going to my dad's grandparents house.  My grandmother's birthday.  Christmas A Butterfly landing on my arm.
	It was Christmas I was excited First day of gymnastics My birthday I love playing with my brother
	Nintendo 3 D Ninjago  5 Below(a store that all prices are below 5 dollars)  and My Mom

 Click Here For The Topics I Care About Sheet

Revisiting Parts to a Page

After having a week off on vacation, we read the story Maisy Goes On Vacation. I picked this story because I wanted to return to the idea of parts to a page. When you turn the page in this story it, tells you a different part of Maisy's vacation. 

The language of parts to a page come from Maryellen Giacobbe. She has a wonderful book written about writing workshop in a kindergarten class. She came to my school for teacher training many years ago, and she is amazing.  She has a very similar style to Katie Wood Ray. 

After reading this story aloud, we had a conversation about all the things Maisy did on vacation. I have a few students struggling with the idea of parts to a page. These students often pick the same topic and tell the same things over and over again. I also have a few students making what I call listing stories. These students list all of their friends in class over and over again. My goal for this lesson was to stress how it's your job as a writer totooto repeathings in your story and to tell us the different parts to each page.	Maryellen talked a lot about teaching parts to a page using the book  My Dog Rosie.The little girl is the author of this book, and her grandfather is the illustrator.  This story tells the adventure that Rosie has while taking care of her grandfather's dog.This story is out of print, but you may have it at your school or  local library.

Think About the Words We Are Spelling

I introduced HAVE A GO! I know when I taught first-grade students did this sheet individually. I decided to do this as a large group mini-lesson focusing on the common words students are misspelling, especially words that have been taught. 

I took the misspellings WS(was) and TER(there) from student's stories. 

We looked at ws for was we talked about how some kids think it ends with a z 

(s can sound like z) but would it look right to have a word end with a Z???

I told the group that it's missing a letter in the middle.

A child HAD A GO and spelled wis.

She did such a smart thing by putting a vowel because all words have vowels she even had the vowel in the right spot, but it's not the right vowel. 

What would look right in between the w and s? 

Think about what the word  looks like?

Another child came up and wrote was.